How to Do Hair Highlights With Foils

Highlighting hair with foils is a technique has become quite popular. The faster way to highlight your hair is to pull it through a frosting cap, but for a lot of people, this can be uncomfortable or their hair is too thick. That's where foil highlights come in.

Things You'll Need

Hair foils, or aluminum foil cut into 4-by-5-inch squares

Small hair paintbrush

Hair clips

Coloring product

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Mix the hair coloring product in a non-metallic bowl according to the product's directions.

Pick or brush your hair. You will need to do this so that it contains no knots. Since brushing your hair can sometimes damage it, especially if your hair is thick, using a pick might be less harmful to your hair.

Use the hair clips to split your hair into small sections. If you are applying highlights to the top layer only or the bottom layer only, you should tie back the sections you will not be coloring. A regular ponytail holder or scrunchy should do fine for this.

Take your first piece of hair that you will be highlighting and brush through it once or twice. Make sure you do not have an extra strand in there from another parted section or your highlights could turn out uneven. Place a long strip of aluminum foil underneath the piece of hair, making sure that the top of the foil is touching the top of the piece of hair, pushed up against the scalp.

Using the hair paintbrush, begin painting the color mix on by starting at the top of each piece of hair (as close to the scalp as possible without touching it) and slowly dragging it to the end. Then take both sides of the foil and fold them over on the top of the hair. You should now have the whole piece covered and should not be able to see any of it.

Repeat this process. As you go along, you need to keep checking the other strips of foil to make sure they remain firmly in place. When finished coloring, let your hair sit for approximately 25 to 35 minutes, and then wash and blow dry. Some people strip the color mix from the hair before washing, with a bath towel. However, this is not recommended because it can break and damage the hair.

Tips & Warnings

Always use conditioner when washing it after adding highlights to keep it healthy and shiny.

When drying, don't hold your hair dryer close to your head or your hair will look fried, especially those new gorgeous highlights.

Don't add too much coloring or it won't settle in completely and some highlights will be more vibrant than others.